The essential and fundamental question of spiritual inquiry is “who am I?” Take a moment now. Take a deeper breath. Relax and let go of figuring things out. Just breathe and let go.
Let go into the experience of “I am”. We all know the “I am” experience. We say, “I am tired.” Or “I am hungry”. Relax into the direct experience of I am.
Can you let go into the I am, the knowing being that knows all experience? That “I am” is the consciousness that you are. It is the felt understanding that, in your essential nature, you are the knowing being before knowing any so-called object in the world. This is your essential nature: I am.
Why is this the fundamental spiritual insight and understanding that opens up an enriched and liberated experience of living? Right now we are locked into a conceptual understanding of ourselves. We identify ourselves as the body, the mind and thought. Actually, we are not any of those. We are the knowing that knows them. We are the knowing that knows the body, mind and thought.
Once we liberate our understanding and identity from thought, mind and body, we open our understanding to let go into the ever-present knowing with which thought, mind and body are known. Then thoughts (and all its reactions to others and the world) become lighter and less reactivating. They are just thoughts (not the truth) arising us, the knowing being in which everything arises.
This is the beginning of liberating ourselves from a false identity with thought and a conceptual “me” inside the body.
Once we release our understanding from this contracted, false identity, we practice abiding in the aware presence we are. Just breathe deeper and relax away from thought identity and into the ever-presence knowing we are.